Monthly Archives: April 2016

Brian Bailey of Semiconductor Engineering recently chaired a panel at DVCon on ESL.

Expecting the future to replicate the past always leads to surprises and when it comes to migration of abstraction for semiconductor design, the future remains unclear.

Brian interviewed several industry leaders with experience in the field and provides interesting insights into why ESL took a long time to get where it has…

Simon Davidmann, CEO of Imperas was quoted several times. For example Simon said: “Everyone is trying to do more with RTL, more design, more verification, more complexity, and they needed a better solution. The industry came up with a C++ class language (SystemC) and then tried to look at what they could do with it. What is needed is to move away from the EDA vendors trying to define ways to sell the technologies they have, to asking the question, ‘How are we going to design systems which are incredibly complex, containing many processors, many hardware blocks and more software than you can imagine?’ How can we design things in a better way? How do we verify things in a better way?”…

Brian Bailey of Semiconductor Engineering recently got several experts together for a round table discussion entitled:

The role of system-level verification is not the same as block-level verification and requires different ways to think about the problem.

The experts included Larry Lapides of Imperas, and also staff from Cadence, Mentor, and Breker Verification.

The discussion started with reflection on a keynote at DVCon this year that Wally Rhines, chairman and CEO of Mentor Graphics, gave. He said that if you pull together a bunch of pre-verified IP blocks, it does not change the verification problem at the system level. That sounds like a problem…